Trade not war: A new approach to counternarcotics supply-side policy | Cannabis Law Report | Where to buy Skittles Moonrock online

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According to a joint study conducted by Stanford University and the medical journal The Lancet, the opioid crisis is on track to claim 1.2 million U.S. lives in this decade. To better respond to this first-order public health crisis, this white paper proposes an alternative approach to international supply-side counternarcotics policy designed to reduce fentanyl-related overdose deaths.

A new target for counternarcotics policy

As Thomas R. Dye argues, policy models should “identify what is significant.”¹ This is the most crucial of all stages, Dye explains, given that “deciding what will be the problems is even more important than deciding what will be the solutions.”²

This white paper nominates the regulatory and other failures of governance that facilitate the traffic in illegally manufactured fentanyl as the appropriate target for U.S. supply-side counternarcotics policy. Most crucially, countries without established and enforced drug-production rules that fail to govern chemically similar “analogues,” and without established and enforced “know-your-customer” provisions for the transport of drugs or their precursors, tolerate deficits in governance which render them susceptible to large-scale traffic in illegally manufactured fentanyl. The international counternarcotics treaties currently relied upon as a basis for drug policy either do not address, or do not adequately respond to, these failures of governance. A counternarcotics policy directed at governments differs markedly from the current approach to international supply-side policy, which assigns responsibility to Mexican criminal organizations and relies on law enforcement as the appropriate response. Notably, as several impartial reviews conducted by the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Research Service observe, counternarcotics policy premised on enforcement against criminal targets has gone without an evaluation “measuring impact, not output.”³ Equally significant, empirical analyses of drug enforcement suggest that drug traffickers respond to these interventions with competitive adaptation, leaving their networks more resilient and, in some cases, more autonomous.⁴

The counternarcotics framework offered here also differs from proposals put forward by drug policy reformers who identify demand for illicit drugs as most significant and, in response, propose a variety of interventions to diminish or more safely satisfy that demand, measuring the effects of these interventions on the reduction of overdose deaths. These crucial interventions notwithstanding, drug supply remains an urgent question for counternarcotics policy. Contrary to a standard narrative, illegally manufactured fentanyl did not appear in U.S. markets in response to demand among opioid users. Although Chinese and Mexican officials remonstrate their American counterparts by insisting that the demand for drugs lies at the heart of the opioid epidemic, research demonstrates that the market for fentanyl specifically is “supply-led”: that is, users would prefer an opioid other than fentanyl.⁵ Fentanyl is an efficiency gain for traffickers and a highly unreliable and dangerous product for its users. Additionally, the harm-reduction efforts supported by many drug reformers do little to reduce drug exposure, another key driver of overdose deaths.

The model set forward here adopts elements of both current counternarcotics policy and the agenda of drug reformers: Supply matters, and so too does the crucial outcome of reducing overdose deaths.

Trade not war: A new approach to counternarcotics supply-side policy

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